scene title: we like girls: shyla & aj
performers: shyla jennings, aj applegate
site: we like girls ◅ adult time (gamma)
production credits: bree mills (dir.)
release date: july 7, 2019 | trailer
toward the end of december 2018, i gave myself the christmas present of signing up to girlsway again, subscribing for the first time since mid-2016. i was surprised to find that it gave me access to adult time, which i hadn't really heard about before then, but i was interested to poke through the vivid archives and reacquaint myself with some forgotten favorites. within a week, however, the news of sexual assault allegations against stills by alan had broken, and i cancelled the subscription, noting that i could not allow my entertainment dollars to go toward a predator. but as the month which i had purchased wore on and alan remained suspended, the we like girls scenes which had prompted my subscription in the first place, scenes that alan had had nothing to do with, became more and more important to me. but i let the month run out, and then alan posted his rebuttal and gamma continued to not reinstate him. and the third we like girls scene was coming up. i was weak; i took another subscription.
by the time the fourth scene was released, i was fully in the tank for we like girls, and i have probably watched that lena paul/ivy lebelle pairing a dozen or so times since as a method of reminding myself that there is good in the world. even so, if gamma was going to reinstate alan, i was going to cancel my subscription. eventually, realizing that i had been spending so much time thinking about porn that i really ought to do something to get it out of my system, i started writing the whole shebang, reviewing every girl/girl scene i was able to legally acquire over the month of april. the fifth we like girls scene was my second highest-scoring scene all month, surpassed only by the ambition of whitney wright's directorial debut.
so of course i was looking forward to this scene. looking forward and looking forward... one month passed with no word on what the sixth and final entry in the season would be; then another month. finally, bree mills posted on her social media a selfie with shyla jennings and aj applegate, and a release date surfaced, almost three months after the last installment. we like girls had stuck to a more-or-less monthly release schedule since beginning in december, but presumably due to bree's decision to finish the season with girl/girl legend shyla jennings and the inevitable scheduling issues (shyla only flies into los angeles from texas every so often, and she and aj are in high demand), the final episode lagged into summer, and got incorporated into gamma's "blockbuster week" promoting a 4th of july sale on adult time subscriptions.
maybe it was the long delay that made it feel different from the previous entries. or maybe it was the change in seasons: the bright summer light bleeding into shyla's and aj's photoshoot seemed to cast a yellower, more high-contrast glow on this entry than the gauzy winter light of earlier episodes. (or maybe it's the difference between nigel dictator's lighting setup and stef onzo's; it felt odd as a perhaps over-invested viewer that the still photographer switched out midway through the series, as nigel's bonhomie gave way to stef's professionalism.) either way, you can't go home again, and what had struck me as unprecedentedly beautiful in winter now felt familiar and a little obvious.
maybe it's just that i'm not a shyla jennings superfan. i quite like her, of course, because i'm a girl/girl consumer and she's performed some of the best girl/girl ever, and i immensely respect her dedication to her craft and the all-out passion with which she approaches each pairing. but as beautiful and bubbly and talented as she is i've never really warmed to her as a personality; some people you just don't click with, and that's the way it goes. similarly, although i'm aware of aj applegate's estimable body of work it's never been top-priority for me; so the two of them together here, while perfectly sweet and adorable and passionate, felt just a little opaque to me, a wavelength i couldn't quite get on, and i ended up feeling more like i was watching two strangers share an intimate moment, and that i was intruding where i shouldn't, than i ever have while watching we like girls.
shyla and aj are long-time friends and practiced lovers, so there was a certain amount of easy familiarity to their work here. neither of them are big talkers in bed, which is certainly their prerogative but also made it harder for me to connect to (i'm such a verbal person, i'm realizing more and more), and they very much know what they're doing, so there was no experimentation or surprise for either of them, just a lot of very intense eye contact, extensive lip-locking, and small but intensely concentrated motions. in some ways it felt like the least porny sex in the whole series, since there was so little camera-friendly positioning or extravagant movement. which again, is great: that's the point of we like girls, to capture authentic sexual chemistry and not just the staged kind that porn so frequently defaults to.
on my second watch through the scene, i felt rather less alienated from it: shyla and aj are so happy to be together (aj's crooked smile as she teases shyla is amazing), and their responsiveness to one another is so immediate and genuine that i feel churlish for not appreciating their pairing as much as i have some of the others on we like girls. (this is not an sly reference to what does or doesn't turn me on, by the way: i don't believe i've ever masturbated to a we like girls scene. that's not, in my aesthetic universe, what they're for.) and at the end i realized why this entry felt so different from the previous ones: series editor clit eastwood was subbed out for mia wydass (yes, gamma's production-side noms de porn are universally groanworthy) for this edition. wydass isn't a bad editor by any means, just different, and the color temperature of her postproduction was just different enough to feel slightly off to someone who is, as i say, possibly over-invested in the series.
shyla and aj were both 29 when they shot this; in the month since, shyla has celebrated her 30th birthday and aj's is coming in the fall. this is shyla's eleventh year in the business and aj's seventh; of the previous ten participants in we like girls only angela white has been in porn longer. it's been a long time, but i am finally starting to see shyla growing into mature womanhood, although her height and chirpy voice will always make her read younger than her age, especially in porn. not that either of them will be ready for milf roles any time soon: difficult as it has become for performers to carve out a career in the search-term vacuum between "teen" and "milf," they've both done very well for themselves as simply women.
every encounter with a piece of art has to be filtered through one's individual psychology in the moment; my personal response to this scene cannot possibly matter to anyone else, but since i'm only writing this blog for myself and expect no one else to read it or pay it the slightest attention, i've recorded it here.
a second season of we like girls will presumably only be forthcoming if the numbers support it: high view counts and complete watch-throughs, new subscriptions through the brand's dedicated affiliate links, subscription retention associated with viewing those scenes, and possibly dvd sales as they trickle out onto physical media. (gamma's relative transparency in the adult time forums is admirable and rare for the industry, even if it does create unrealistic expectations among subscribers who feel entitled to be kept in the loop on every decision however small.) i'm doing my part to ensure that enagement with the we like girls scenes is high: it remains my favorite overall girl/girl series of the year, and quite possibly of all time. but i'm used to being outnumbered in terms of taste, and will attempt not to get my hopes up. i'm so grateful for this amazing season, and even if it's never repeated will cherish it for years to come.
performances: 30
cinematography: 25
editing: 18
script: 14
sjw points: 0
total score:
performers: shyla jennings, aj applegate
site: we like girls ◅ adult time (gamma)
production credits: bree mills (dir.)
release date: july 7, 2019 | trailer
 |
| l: shyla jennings, r: aj applegate |
toward the end of december 2018, i gave myself the christmas present of signing up to girlsway again, subscribing for the first time since mid-2016. i was surprised to find that it gave me access to adult time, which i hadn't really heard about before then, but i was interested to poke through the vivid archives and reacquaint myself with some forgotten favorites. within a week, however, the news of sexual assault allegations against stills by alan had broken, and i cancelled the subscription, noting that i could not allow my entertainment dollars to go toward a predator. but as the month which i had purchased wore on and alan remained suspended, the we like girls scenes which had prompted my subscription in the first place, scenes that alan had had nothing to do with, became more and more important to me. but i let the month run out, and then alan posted his rebuttal and gamma continued to not reinstate him. and the third we like girls scene was coming up. i was weak; i took another subscription.
by the time the fourth scene was released, i was fully in the tank for we like girls, and i have probably watched that lena paul/ivy lebelle pairing a dozen or so times since as a method of reminding myself that there is good in the world. even so, if gamma was going to reinstate alan, i was going to cancel my subscription. eventually, realizing that i had been spending so much time thinking about porn that i really ought to do something to get it out of my system, i started writing the whole shebang, reviewing every girl/girl scene i was able to legally acquire over the month of april. the fifth we like girls scene was my second highest-scoring scene all month, surpassed only by the ambition of whitney wright's directorial debut.
so of course i was looking forward to this scene. looking forward and looking forward... one month passed with no word on what the sixth and final entry in the season would be; then another month. finally, bree mills posted on her social media a selfie with shyla jennings and aj applegate, and a release date surfaced, almost three months after the last installment. we like girls had stuck to a more-or-less monthly release schedule since beginning in december, but presumably due to bree's decision to finish the season with girl/girl legend shyla jennings and the inevitable scheduling issues (shyla only flies into los angeles from texas every so often, and she and aj are in high demand), the final episode lagged into summer, and got incorporated into gamma's "blockbuster week" promoting a 4th of july sale on adult time subscriptions.
maybe it was the long delay that made it feel different from the previous entries. or maybe it was the change in seasons: the bright summer light bleeding into shyla's and aj's photoshoot seemed to cast a yellower, more high-contrast glow on this entry than the gauzy winter light of earlier episodes. (or maybe it's the difference between nigel dictator's lighting setup and stef onzo's; it felt odd as a perhaps over-invested viewer that the still photographer switched out midway through the series, as nigel's bonhomie gave way to stef's professionalism.) either way, you can't go home again, and what had struck me as unprecedentedly beautiful in winter now felt familiar and a little obvious.
maybe it's just that i'm not a shyla jennings superfan. i quite like her, of course, because i'm a girl/girl consumer and she's performed some of the best girl/girl ever, and i immensely respect her dedication to her craft and the all-out passion with which she approaches each pairing. but as beautiful and bubbly and talented as she is i've never really warmed to her as a personality; some people you just don't click with, and that's the way it goes. similarly, although i'm aware of aj applegate's estimable body of work it's never been top-priority for me; so the two of them together here, while perfectly sweet and adorable and passionate, felt just a little opaque to me, a wavelength i couldn't quite get on, and i ended up feeling more like i was watching two strangers share an intimate moment, and that i was intruding where i shouldn't, than i ever have while watching we like girls.
shyla and aj are long-time friends and practiced lovers, so there was a certain amount of easy familiarity to their work here. neither of them are big talkers in bed, which is certainly their prerogative but also made it harder for me to connect to (i'm such a verbal person, i'm realizing more and more), and they very much know what they're doing, so there was no experimentation or surprise for either of them, just a lot of very intense eye contact, extensive lip-locking, and small but intensely concentrated motions. in some ways it felt like the least porny sex in the whole series, since there was so little camera-friendly positioning or extravagant movement. which again, is great: that's the point of we like girls, to capture authentic sexual chemistry and not just the staged kind that porn so frequently defaults to.
on my second watch through the scene, i felt rather less alienated from it: shyla and aj are so happy to be together (aj's crooked smile as she teases shyla is amazing), and their responsiveness to one another is so immediate and genuine that i feel churlish for not appreciating their pairing as much as i have some of the others on we like girls. (this is not an sly reference to what does or doesn't turn me on, by the way: i don't believe i've ever masturbated to a we like girls scene. that's not, in my aesthetic universe, what they're for.) and at the end i realized why this entry felt so different from the previous ones: series editor clit eastwood was subbed out for mia wydass (yes, gamma's production-side noms de porn are universally groanworthy) for this edition. wydass isn't a bad editor by any means, just different, and the color temperature of her postproduction was just different enough to feel slightly off to someone who is, as i say, possibly over-invested in the series.
shyla and aj were both 29 when they shot this; in the month since, shyla has celebrated her 30th birthday and aj's is coming in the fall. this is shyla's eleventh year in the business and aj's seventh; of the previous ten participants in we like girls only angela white has been in porn longer. it's been a long time, but i am finally starting to see shyla growing into mature womanhood, although her height and chirpy voice will always make her read younger than her age, especially in porn. not that either of them will be ready for milf roles any time soon: difficult as it has become for performers to carve out a career in the search-term vacuum between "teen" and "milf," they've both done very well for themselves as simply women.
every encounter with a piece of art has to be filtered through one's individual psychology in the moment; my personal response to this scene cannot possibly matter to anyone else, but since i'm only writing this blog for myself and expect no one else to read it or pay it the slightest attention, i've recorded it here.
a second season of we like girls will presumably only be forthcoming if the numbers support it: high view counts and complete watch-throughs, new subscriptions through the brand's dedicated affiliate links, subscription retention associated with viewing those scenes, and possibly dvd sales as they trickle out onto physical media. (gamma's relative transparency in the adult time forums is admirable and rare for the industry, even if it does create unrealistic expectations among subscribers who feel entitled to be kept in the loop on every decision however small.) i'm doing my part to ensure that enagement with the we like girls scenes is high: it remains my favorite overall girl/girl series of the year, and quite possibly of all time. but i'm used to being outnumbered in terms of taste, and will attempt not to get my hopes up. i'm so grateful for this amazing season, and even if it's never repeated will cherish it for years to come.
performances: 30
cinematography: 25
editing: 18
script: 14
sjw points: 0
total score: